


distractions

by blueincandescence



Category: Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 06:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15989909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: Five times Owen wasn't able to distract Claire with a kiss and one time he very, very much was.





	1. summer 2015

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ibrokeeverything over on tumblr for the clawen ficathon! Woefully incomplete because I am a bad time manager when not at work, so...3K now and more to come!
> 
> Prompt: Owen kissing Claire to distract her from her work (or anything similar)  
> Three things you’d like included: lots of kisses, I’d like it to be post-Fallen Kingdom if possible, that’s all

_i._

Owen doesn’t care much for Claire’s work—Senior Assets Manager, as if these animals were nothing more than walking stock commodities—but damn if he doesn’t like to watch her work. She spreads her arms, smooths her hands on the table, and leans forward. Her large, pale eyes are as intent on her target as any predator Owen has worked with. The suited up InGen stooge shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

So does Owen. For different reasons.

At least, they’d better be different reasons. He squints at the suit to assess whether he’s looking down Claire’s neckline. Owen himself has a hell of a view from the back—that pencil skirt of hers tightening across the curve he’d gripped to oblivion four nights ago.

Claire drives home her point—about the raptor paddock needing to be left out of public viewings to preserve the integrity of the research—by turning to Owen. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Grady?”

Owen shifts to relieve some of the pressure in his lap, drawing the agenda closer to him. Whoever invented glass conference tables had not been fucking a coworker. Not really a coworker. Essentially his boss. Shifting anew, Owen clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says.

Claire lifts an eyebrow, an exasperated invitation to elaborate.

“That’s right,” Owen adds.

After a microscopic eye roll, Claire launches back in.

Ten minutes later, the suit is talking like it was his idea to keep the raptors sequestered all along. He lingers over his handshake with Claire. Owen plants himself in the suit’s eyeline, arms crossed like he doesn’t have anything better to do with his day than be at this meeting. Point of fact, Owen can think of a thousand better things to do. But seventy-five percent of them involve the redhead in the skirt suit and heels in front of him. So here he stands.

When the suit is gone and the doors are closed, Claire gives Owen the pursed-lipped look she’s been holding back. “Thank you for your stunning insights.” She walks around him to get to her reports, wafting vanilla. “I recall you having a lot more to say when you stormed up to me at the paddock last month.”

Owen indulges in a smirk bound to make her crazy. “Aw, honey. You remember our anniversary.” He steps behind her, not close enough to touch. She’s too skittish for that. Just close enough so she can feel the Caribbean sun baked into him.

Tension draws the sharp lines of Claire’s shoulders together. It must weigh on her, how impulsive she’d been that night. With him. She’s probably blamed it on the heat, the jungle, the strange loneliness of an island pulsing with people there one minute, gone the next. Owen doesn’t care how she justifies it, so long as she keeps scratching at his door.

“People can see,” Claire says, admonishing. But Owen hears the tremor, sees it in her jaw, turned toward him. One of the walls is glass, sure, but no one is walking around outside.

Owen steadies his hands on her waist and waits. This is a new environment. He doesn't know how she’ll react.

Claire lifts her heel. Rocks back, her ass pressing to the tent in his pants. “Jesus, do you walk around like that?” She says it like she’s disgusted, like he’s a fucking Neanderthal. And part of him loves it. Wants to lean her back over that table and give her what she hates to want from him so, so bad.

Another part of him does care how she justifies it—doesn’t want her to have to justify him at all.

He holds her waist, breathes against her neck. Trembling becomes shivering. Claire tilts her head back, baring her pale neck. With an approving rumble, he rewards them both with his teeth scraping over her hitching pulse point.

He’s kissing up the side of her throat to her slack chin to her beckoning mouth—slick and glossy and so unexpectedly filthy in the dark—when the buzz of her phone against the glass table sends Claire out of her skin.

“Leave it,” Owen commands, rough, lost. The only clear thought he has is the quick work his pocket knife would make of Claire’s skin-tight skirt.

Claire elbows him in the side.

Owen backs up, remembering too late Claire gives the orders, has to, or she throws up a wall higher than the T. Rex cage.

In the space of two rings, Claire has her short hair slicked down and her wrinkles smoothed. Color stains her cheeks, but the caller would never know from her cool, even voice. The Ice Queen cometh.

Well, no, actually. That would have to wait for the heat and the dark.

Claire presses her palm to the speaker, stage whispering, “I’m very busy. We’ll continue our—” her nose wrinkles “—consultation later, hm?”

Owen gives a take-it-or-leave-it shrug for the satisfaction of seeing her temper flare. It’s pure wounded pride, but it’s not like she notices. He turns and walks away, unable to stop himself from shooting one last look through the glass. Claire is deep into conversation, nodding and gesturing her points. The master of her corporate, climate-controlled element.

They’ll fuck outside next time she comes, dripping sweat. Dirt under her fingernails. Mosquito bites itching at every meeting.


	2. winter 2015

_ii._

All day, Owen surges with a need to kiss Claire.

See, a kiss is the only way Owen can to tell Claire how messed up it is they hadn’t been able to bounce back from their single, disaster date. Words are where things go to hell between them. Kisses have never been the problem.

Owen wants to kiss Claire at his bungalow.

Strike that, he tries to goad her into kissing him. Claire has that saunter in her step, the one she puts on to show him up. She has that look in her eye, the one she gets when she’s trying to pull rank on him.

Alpha bitch is what Owen called Claire, kicking a rock, when she had called them off unilaterally.

Alpha bitch is what Owen thinks to himself when Claire tells him he stinks and glides away in those ridiculous shoes. Owen fucking loves it as much as he hates Claire pretending that’s all there is to her. To them.

Claire shows him how much deeper she goes in the field, a dying brontosaurus between them. That hard glint in her eyes melts with genuine feeling. Claire loved these animals once. The pressures of her job would’ve hardened anyone. Owen wants to kiss her. Wants to hold her hand at the horror of so much death. Only something manmade could be so cruel.

Owen wants to kiss Claire when she rolls up her sleeves and marches into the forest.

Wants to kiss her when they grip each other in fear.

He makes a pact with himself that he will kiss Claire before the Indominus Rex snaps her jaws closed around them. Some nights during their fling, Claire had dropped her defenses, let Owen be kind. He will use his last breath to thank her for that.

Then Claire goes and saves his life.

Owen’s elbows have weakened. He can’t reach his gun. But Claire skull-butts a prehistoric murder bird and plants four bullets in her like she was born to it. Definitely not the first time that day the need to kiss Claire—disheveled, panting, magnificent—has surged in Owen. It’s the time he can’t help but act on it.

He takes her hand up. Pulls her to him. Presses his lips, his body to hers in gratitude, in longing, in pure admiration. For one beautiful moment Claire is _his_ alpha bitch and holy fuck.

Then Claire pulls back. She gasps, she gapes. She sees her nephews out of the corner of her eye and runs to them.

“Who’s that?” the older one asks, seeing Owen come up behind Claire.

“We work together,” Claire tells him.

Grim, Owen gets them moving again. Safety. Containment. A kiss is not a priority in this situation. He lets Claire’s dismissal go. For now.

Owen made his point. The kiss was the start of a conversation they’ll finish later.

You know. If they survive.


	3. winter 2016

_ iii. _

After the evacuations, after the affidavits, Masrani Global sets up key park personnel in a hotel resort in San Jose.

Owen is not key personnel—is, in fact, someone the lawyers try to buy off the second he steps off Isla Nublar on the condition he walks away. It’s a good deal. Owen has said his one goodbye. And he has always known this for-profit exercise in hubris would come back to bite. 

But Owen does not walk away. Because Claire is key personnel.   
  
“Where she goes,” Owen says to a clipboard in human form, “I go.”

Twenty-four hours before, had he said anything close to that, the woman whose lower back his arm bracketed would have stiffened, scoffed. Told him off. 

Claire leans on him as she draws up to say, “If InGen wants my help, I have several conditions.”   


Those conditions are met and then some. With Masrani dead, no one knows more about the now-dissolved InGen's legal obligations. Claire refuses media calls. But she picks up for the lawyers.   
  
By week three, she's screaming into her cell phone.   
  
Nostrils flared, hair a mess. Pacing the balcony as she cites the legal and moral obligations that are due to the assets—“The  _ animals _ ”—on the island. “Yes,” she yells, exasperation deepening her already hoarse voice. “The ones that almost  _ ate me _ .”   
  
From the hammock, Owen watches Claire work herself up under half-lidded eyes. He has enough self-preservation not to suggest she calm down. But when a vein on her neck starts sticking out like Schwarzenegger’s, Owen gets up and makes them both a drink. He gives hers all the fruit left in the fridge and two umbrellas. 

Claire has been known to put her palm over the speaker, pull a grateful look, and wrap up her call. But the Claire of this second has smoke coming out of her ears. She swats Owen away without seeing him.   
  
Annoyance flares. Owen pushes it toward InGen and Masrani Global and all the other vultures. Toward the media. 

Under the novel Claire swore she was reading, Owen finds a magazine with Claire on the cover, a photo-op between Masrani and a group of executives. The headlines reads  _ Verizon Wireless Presents: Indominus Death.  _ Subtitled  _ Who's to Blame?  _

Owen rips the magazine in half, chucking it at a trash can.   
  
Claire whips around to look at him. Her anger meets his. 

They both twist, soften. They've been cooped up in this room so long they're on the edge of considering each other the enemy.   
  
Ear still glued to her phone, Claire holds out her arm, takes Owen's hand, and pulls him in for an apologetic peck. Owen, mouth slanting over Claire's, turns it into a real kiss. To his shock and gratification, she pushes up on her toes and makes it into a heated invitation.

Owen takes the rare opportunity to divest Claire of her phone, rumbling into the receiver, “You’re all a bag of dicks,” before chucking it onto the carpet. 

Claire howls with laughter as Owen carries her to bed.

Their anger, her stress, his restlessness—they work it out on the mattress. Tussling and panting. Claire rides him like he’s a five-dollar mechanical bull. Owen rolls Claire onto her stomach and fucks her gripping the headboard for leverage. They wear each other out before they wear each other thin.

In the dark, Owen wakes to the muffled sounds of Claire out on the balcony. Her voice rises. She hasn’t skipped a beat.


	4. 2017

_ iv. _

It takes a year to untangle themselves from InGen. A year of waiting peppered by claims files and court appearances. 

For convenience, InGen puts them up in an apartment near their headquarters in San Francisco. Claire goes through the motions of loving the city. The coffee shops, the art boutiques. Owen makes it clear he hates the crowds, the lack of sky. He comments on life-after-the-trial in terms of life-after-San-Francisco and is relieved when Claire doesn’t correct him. 

Somewhat relieved. It isn’t like Claire not to assert herself when a plan is forming. Owen doesn’t know Claire is job hunting until he answers her phone and has to give her a rejection message. He can tell by her dull reaction it isn’t the first.

They spend a lot of time with Claire’s family up north. Her sister drops pointed comments about what a great mother she’ll be. Claire is flustered and Owen is so not ready to go there, but he can’t tamp back a little smile. He catches Claire doing the same, only it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. The week of the divorce proceedings, they take the boys camping. After dark, Zach wanders off to make a phone call. He’s missing ten minutes. It takes twice that for Claire to stop shaking.

When the trials are finished, while they wait for a settlement to tell them how much their lives are worth, Owen takes Claire out to Colorado. He introduces her to the nature preserve first, then his mom. He stands with Claire looking out over miles and miles of natural solitude. For what may be the first time, he feels the tension melt from her shoulders.

On the way back to the house, Owen says, “What if we just drove?”

Claire, her head resting against him, closes her eyes. Nods. 

Owen picks out the best RV a money can buy and makes her laugh it his enthusiasm for all the bells and whistles. Before they put a mile on the odometer, they Christen their room-sized bed, their fold-out couch, their roof deck. The driver’s seat and the passenger seat for good measure.

Freedom makes Claire’s kisses so sweet. Owen picks a road he likes and starts driving.

After a while, sniping is expected. Hours in a vehicle with one other person will do that. Then the sarcasm gets sharper. Claire got under Owen’s skin day one and damn does that woman know how to dig. 

“Where are we going?” she demands. It’d be a fair question if he had an answer. Anyplace they stop, she looks at real estate ads. “Would it be so bad to have a home with me?” she asks so softly he feels like an ass.

Glowering at his eggs, Owens says, “I do have a home with you.” He’s defensive. He’s itching to get a move on.

Claire takes out her frustration on the RV—which she calls his baby. His baby is a trash pit she says when she finds the dirty laundry overflowing. So sorry there’s no room for a maid, he snipes back. His baby is a heap of junk she says the first time they break down on the side of a desert road. So sorry it’s not a penthouse. On and on. 

Claire sleeps at a motel. Owen holds a vanilla-scented pillow against his face and hollers.

Following a shake-the-RV-walls kind of fight, Owen signs them up for a week-long wilderness survival course. It’s a cheap ploy, but it works. It’s them against hunger, terrain, storms. They fend off a bear. They fuck when the adrenaline is highest. They’re a team.

The experience rattles something loose in Claire. She starts talking about the park, her job. About the dinosaurs and what will happen to them. How she feels like she owes them something. Owen grips the steering wheel but listens to her talk. 

His takeaway is she needs to feel useful, so between bouts of driving they volunteer. They build houses and rescue animals. They help out at organic farms and summer camps. Every nonprofit Claire touches turns to gold, whether it be through operations or donors. She tells Owen she feels like herself again.

And, God, he’s happy to hear it. He is. But then she starts keeping a notebook. Just jotting down ideas, but he knows her better than that. She falls asleep after midnight, her cheek on her arm, drooling on a doodle of a brontosaurus with the letters DPG underneath. 

They fight. She says she wants to rent a house, stay put, get back on the grid. She says she’s car sick. She used to say she was happy.

Claire wants to talk about life-after-this.

Owen only wants this. 

Her and him. Dinosaurs don’t need protecting, this relationship does. Claire does, from the stress. He can already feel it in her shoulders, in the way she won’t melt in his arms unless he’s making her come.

They fuck three times a day to keep from talking. 

Their latest fight is about her driving the RV. It’s a behemoth. In a lot of states, she’d need a CDL. Not in this state, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, Owen drives. He drives north, south, east. The minute Claire gets behind the wheel, he knows they’ll be headed west. She’s been looking up office space on Mission Hill. She’s been pacing outside the RV cold calling the rich.

Owen is drinking a beer on the roof when Claire comes up. She stands behind him. “Was there anything you liked about San Francisco?” When he doesn’t answer, she tries, “Taco trucks? Football games?”

“San Francisco sucks.” Owen hates the edge in his voice. It sounds like spite, like fear.

Claire laughs but nothing’s funny. She sobers up. “Owen—”

“This is our home, Claire.”

“A home is something you build. This is…” Claire lays her hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Just driving.” 

Owen pulls Claire into his lap. They kiss, hot and deep. And then they’re biting and tearing each other’s clothes. Angry but really so fucking sad. Because they know what’s coming and kisses can’t stop it.

It took a year to untangle themselves from InGen. It took another year to unravel themselves. 


End file.
